‘We’ll Turn Gaza Into Dust’: Israeli Police Officer Threatens Journalist

Rabat – As Israel’s mass slaughter of Palestinian civilians continues, videos of Israeli police threatening journalists are going viral on the internet.

One video shows a journalist from Al Arabi reporting live when an Israeli police officer interrupted his reporting and threatened him that he “will be in trouble” if he didn’t say that all Hamas should be “slaughtered.”

“What are you saying now?” the Israeli officer asked in a threatening tone while standing between the journalist and the camera. “Wait a minute, I’m on air,” the journalist informed him, to which the officer responded: “I don’t care [if] you are on air.”

“I’m telling what the Israeli spokesperson of the army is saying,” the journalist answered.

The officer then lashed out threatening: “It’s better if you say good things! Understood? All Hamas must be slaughtered, is that clear?”

The officer then left only to return seconds later and face the camera directly and say “We’ll turn Gaza into dust”

“Israeli police are monitoring what we say. He came up to me and threatened me,” the journalist said in the live broadcast to the host of the show.

In a separate incident, an RT journalist said: “I’ve been working 14 years in the press and ten years with RT and in very bad situations, also in, like, zero-point confrontation lines. But this is the first time I feel that the freedom of the press is at stake here. There is no freedom of the press.”

This is not the first time that Israel, which is often hailed by the West as the only democratic state in the Middle East, has cracked down on freedom of speech.

In late October, the Guardian reported that two activists from a Jewish-Arab peace movement were detained in Israel for holding up posters with a message that the police deemed to be offensive.

The message was: “Jews and Arabs, we will get through this together.”

The police confiscated their posters, as well as T-shirts printed with peace slogans in Arabic and Hebrew.

The report also maintains that the case of the two activists is not an isolated incident as people across Israel are being detained, fired from their jobs, and even attacked for expressing pro-Palestine sentiments.